Loyalist's faculty on strike

There will be no classes for the 2,800 students at Loyalist College as long as their teachers are walking the picket line.

Loyalist teachers joined 12,000 colleagues from 23 other Ontario colleges walking off the job at 12:01 a.m. Monday morning after talks between Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) (representing professors, instructors counsellors and librarians) and the College Employer Council broke down.

At Loyalist, pickets were stopping vehicles entering the property to “share information” before allowing them to proceed.

President of Local 420, Eric Bauer, a professor in the environmental studies department at Loyalist, said OPSEU had made three proposals to the Employer Council, asking for a 50:50 ratio in the number of full-time faculty to the number of faculty members on contract; increased job security for part-time faculty, and academic freedom to give faculty a stronger voice in academic decision-making.

Bauer said it is critical teachers have a louder voice on academic matters.

“We have academic managers who in many cases haven’t been in the classroom, with no experience in the area they are managing, making decisions on what will be taught and so far as to make decisions as to what marks students will receive,” Bauer said. “They have the unilateral authority to change the mark at the end of a semester if a student has not achieved the required degree of performance to carry on. Those managers can exercise it and should the teacher, the professional in this vocational specification, not be integral in the decision making as to whether the student has achieved the requisite success?”

Bauer said OPSEU represents Loyalist’s 109 full-time teachers and another 80 partial-load teachers who work between seven and 12 hours per week. He estimates the college also employs another 230 faculty members on contract, not represented by the union.

“We have seen some hiring here because a year ago those 80 partial-load (teachers) were less than half that and two years ago, more than 75 per cent less than that,” he said. “So, cynically, this happened in advance of potential job action because of an expiring contract and their complete reluctance to put full-time teachers in the classroom. In this 2014–2017 contract, we lost about 30 per cent of our full-time staff through termination in their probationary period, layoffs and folks who took retirement incentive plans. In that period we lost 25 to 30 per cent of our full-time staff with no replacement.”

Bauer said fairness for unionized contract faculty is another priority.

“There is no job security and we have people who have been here more than 20 years and they still have to negotiate a new contract every four months or every semester if you will,” he said. “A semester is approximately 14 weeks so their work year might only be 28 weeks, yet they have to negotiate every four months – not a very fair environment.”